Artful single-atom catalysts can enable sustainable chemical and pharmaceutical synthesis

National University of Singapore (NUS) chemists have developed an "anchoring-borrowing" strategy, combined with facet engineering, to develop a new class of artful single-atom catalysts (ASACs). These catalysts are formed by anchoring foreign single atoms onto specific facets of reducible support materials, allowing them to bypass the traditional oxidative addition step in cross-coupling reactions, which are widely used in the fine chemical and pharmaceutical industries.